Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, has come under fire after personally
deleting ‘many’ images he deemed pornographic from the digital encyclopaedia.

Wales, who wants to purge the site of images which “appeal solely to prurient interests” has been criticised by fellow Wikipedia users for deleting the images without any consultation.

However, in a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list, Wales said he had acted "in the interest of encouraging this discussion to be about real philosophical/content issues…[rather than] , rather than [for it to] be about me and how quickly I acted".

The site, which anyone can contribute to or edit, is founded on the principle of group collaboration – which has made it the largest encyclopaedia in the world. There are more than three million entries in the English version and yet survives on 25 paid staff and a core of dedicated volunteers who painstakingly protect, edit and source the reams of material uploaded every day.

Last week hundreds of images were also deleted by the administrators of Wikimedia Commons – a media file store used to hold Wikipedia articles.

However, since the row escalated over the weekend, some images approved by the Wikipedia contributors’ community have been reinstated onto the site.

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Wales, who has now voluntarily given up some of his site privileges, like being able to delete and edit ‘protected content’, after contributors’ protests, began his mission to clean the site up a few weeks after the Wikipedia’s estranged co-founder, Larry Sanger, accused Wikimedia Commons, of “knowingly distributing child pornography”.

US news network, Fox News, then followed up the story, contacting some of the high profile donors to the Wikimedia Foundation, the encyclopedia’s parent company, asking if they had any knowledge about Sanger’s claims.

Wales has further clarified the type of images he wants removed from the site as: “obscene visual representations of the abuse of children” and not simply photographs of young children.

Michael Peel, chair of Wikimedia UK, told BBC News that the row over explicit material has recently "come to a head". The central issue at the moment, he says, is "whether the content is educational".

"Anyone can come to Wikimedia Commons and upload media. Illegal stuff is deleted, and copyright stuff is deleted."

More recently the rate at which new articles are being submitted to the English-language version of Wikipedia has slowed down. According to research performed in August 2009, there are 1,300 articles being added a day, compared with 2,200 which were being created in July 2007.

The site came under fire last year when it announced new measures which enabled a core group of volunteer editors to adjudicate on any changes made to a living person's Wikipedia before those modifications were published.

These new measures, known as “flagged revisions” were designed to combat the growing problem of vandalism on the site. The measures mean that amendments made by a new Wikipedia user to the page of a famous person or someone in the news, such as Tony Blair, are held in a queue for as long as a few days, until the editors have checked the veracity of the new material. This new process was criticised by many observers for being a fundamental shift in Wikipedia’s approach to gathering and sharing of online information.

Mr Wales, in aninterviewwith The Telegraph, last year, dismissed concerns that the web encyclopaedia has changed its ethos. He said: “We have not compromised. There has always been protection on the site. There is a mythology that Wikipedia used to be a crazy anarchy but that just isn’t true. We have an ongoing trend towards openness – which is getting more open. People used to have to register to make these sort of changes to high profile Wikipedia pages and then wait a few days. Now they can upload the changes without registering and wait to see if they are uploaded.”